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This article was taken from the January issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online

One of the first films to rely on digital effects went almost unnoticed. Now an untested director has rebooted the 1982 cult classic. Wired hooks up to the Tron: Legacy mainframe.

In a postcard-perfect late-summer morning in California, Joseph Kosinski, the director of Tron: Legacy, steers his tricked out, leather-seated Porsche through Santa Monica. The lanes are crowded as usual, but Kosinski whips through the traffic coolly and effortlessly, as though he were a character driving in a video game. He talks about his recent work with a soft-spoken pride. "It's a completely fabricated universe," he says. "Everything inside Tron world had to be designed. And it had to be built either physically or on a computer. That's why it's taken us so long to make this movie. I had an art department for a year and a half just designing. Everything from the city plan down to the smallest detail of a lamp post. You can't just buy stuff off the shelf and put it in the movie. Everything has to be tweaked and built from scratch."

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This is the legacy of the original Tron, conceived by animator Steven Lisberger as a tribute to the dawn of the digital age, and released by Disney in 1982 when games like Pong,

Space Invaders and Missile Command were transforming the human imagination. Tron wasn't a sophisticated piece of storytelling by any standards, and was pretty much a financial disappointment (it earned $33 million in the US -- well below the level of a blockbuster), but its impact is still being felt on movies long after more successful films have faded into the cultural ether. Tron was the first film to rely on digital special effects, a technique so innovative at the time that the Academy refused to give it an Oscar nomination -- because it said digital techniques were tantamount to cheating.

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But beyond its technological breakthroughs, Tron has retained a powerful cultural resonance. Something about

Tron's world, in which anthropomorphised "programs" go about their lives in a society that they seemingly created themselves, spoke to a generation of nerds who spent after-school hours learning how to code in Basic and Fortran, and who played

Asteroids on their Atari 2600s. "Tron changed the way I perceived the world because I could perceive that geeks had entered the Hollywood dream machine," says sci-fi novelist and US Wired correspondent Bruce Sterling. "It's hard to remember now how unlikely that was, since Hollywood was so chic and computers were so dismally boring. I didn't mind that the movie was silly, with dull chase scenes and ludicrous versions of cyberspace. It was exciting to see a big-budget movie so dominated by computerised means of production." Kosinski -- who was too young to see Tron at the cinema and watched it later on VHS -- was also part of that generation. As he pulls up in the car park of Digital Domain, the visual-effects production studio where he's overseeing the crafting of the sequel, you almost expect the car to dematerialise around him, like Tron's iconic light-cycles. "It's very rare to get a project where an entire city should feel like it's designed by one person," he says. "But in this movie, every vehicle, every costume, every piece of the world had to feel like it had all come from one mind." He fires up on his iPod some of the out-takes from the Daft Punk soundtrack he commissioned for the movie. The songs have a security code in case the device gets stolen; they can't get leaked before their time.

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Kosinski's work, and his life, now has a Daft Punk backing track, which pretty much summarises how things are going for him on what he calls the "sacred ground" of

Tron world. "I got to be the mind," he says, "which was very cool."

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When Disney announced in late 2007 that Kosinski would be directing the Tron sequel, the message boards echoed with a resounding "Who?" He was a seemingly left-field choice to take on a major-studio special effects- laden film: he'd been in Hollywood for just four years, had been hired to make a single movie (a remake of Logan's Run which is currently in production with another director) and is an assistant professor of architecture at Columbia.

Kosinski went to Stanford University to study jazz and aerospace engineering. He took a product-design class where the instructor told him he had potential in the field. That persuaded Kosinski to apply to Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, which was pursuing innovative digital work, giving its students design tools used only in the automotive and special-effects industries. He didn't have the patience for architecture, but he found himself inspired by a dream of a digital future. "For whatever reason, I've always found digital tools to be a very fluid way of working," he says. "As good as an artist as I always wanted to be, I could never draw with my hand what I could see with my mind. But when it came to the computer, I found out I could. There's a certain precision to it that suited my style."

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Along with a partner, Dean di Simone, Kosinski started a company called KD Lab, which was, their mission statement said, "interested in exploring the blurred boundaries between architecture, film and graphics" that created "a seamless combination of the virtual and the real". They began making short films on their computers and distributing them online. For this, they were assailed on two sides: for presuming that architects could be filmmakers, and for wasting their valuable degrees by becoming web designers. But Kosinski didn't care. "We just did what we loved," he says.

Kosinski moved to Los Angeles in 2005, looking for commercial work. Two weeks after arriving, he says, "I didn't have any furniture in my apartment, I hadn't even unpacked, and I got a call from David Fincher's production company." Fincher, the renowned director of Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Social Network, had seen a couple of surrealistic French Nike spots that Kosinski had made for no money and saw potential.

Within a year Kosinski had a commercial on the air. More followed, including spots for the video games Gears of War and

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Halo and one for Saab. Quickly, Kosinski generated a reputation as someone who could craft an emotional narrative using vivid, detailed virtual environments.

In late 2007, Kosinski met Disney executive Sean Bailey (now president of production) to discuss the sequel. There had been discussions with Steven Lisberger, the original Tron creator, and the time had come to start thinking seriously about the project. There wasn't a script, just a vague concept, but, Kosinski said for now, the script didn't matter.

The original Tron plot is as follows: dashing young programming genius Kevin Flynn, played by Jeff Bridges, has been frozen out of the server and fired by Encom, the company that he had helped put on the map when he created its signature game,

Space Paranoids. After about 20minutes of fairly wooden exposition, Flynn gets "digitised" and sucked into the Encom server, where the computerised version of him, wearing a skintight suit covered with glowing circuit boards, must ally with Tron, a generically heroic "program" played by Bruce Boxleitner. They do battle with the sinister Master Control Program and his minions, led by venerable British scene chewer David Warner. The good guys win. Flynn returns to the real world with his reputation vindicated, and he becomes head of the company.

Kosinski realised it wasn't the plot that made the first

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Tron such a cult favourite; it was the technology. So he moved his pitch to Disney in that direction. The story could come after he had built the world. "I pitched this idea that the server has been disconnected from the internet, and has kind of evolved on its own, like the Galápagos Islands," he says. "There is no mention of the internet, there is no Twitter, none of that crap. I really wanted it to be like a western in the world of Tron. It's an evolved world, like a couple of thousand years later in computer time. The DNA of all that design has evolved into something much more visceral and photo-real and cool."

Kosinski asked for enough money to produce a two- to three minute short that would convey the feel of the movie. If Disney liked it, then they could move forward. Bailey agreed. Kosinski received the budget, he says, "of a medium-size commercial". This allowed him to hire a team of eight people, though it was not enough for a production designer. Kosinski had to take the lead himself.

Six months later, the trailer debuted at Comic-Con 2008 to an audience of hundreds of dedicated Tron fans. The first two minutes showed a light-cycle chase with graphics that were far more detailed than in the first movie. That got the crowd excited enough. But at the end of the trailer, when the bad guy pulls off his helmet to reveal a digitised version of Jeff Bridges's face -- and not just Jeff Bridges, but a young Jeff Bridges -- the crowd cheered wildly. Disney approved the movie shortly thereafter. Tron would ride again.

The announcement of the sequel didn't exactly set the world aflame. John Hodgman, US Wired and New York Times contributor and walking incarnation of the PC (at least in the Apple adverts), says he "remembers watching the first movie many times as a child, wishing it were not crud, for all it foresaw and promised: 3D animation creating a new style of cinematic dreamscape! An image of the future in which we all have glowing counterparts interacting in a virtual world! Death Frisbees! But for all the cool elements, it was also muddy in its plot, and in the odd, muted palette of the game world itself -- which looked like a weird, hand-coloured silent movie directed by Klaus Nomi."

Tron: Legacy's plot has been structured to bear the brunt of well honed critiques such as Hodgman's, and looks to have more emotional resonance than the first movie. In the sequel, Kevin Flynn, still played by Jeff Bridges, has been missing since 1989, living inside the Encom server. He manages to contact his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) in the real world, and Sam goes on a virtual quest to find him, navigating the nightmarish dystopia that

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Tron world has become with the help of a female "protector" program, played by Olivia Wilde. But it's still not entirely clear if the visuals exist to serve the story, or vice versa. Usually, effects are outsourced after movies go into production, but with Tron: Legacy the progression was different. "We helped Joe [Kosinski] make the movie from concept stages until the final day of production," says Steve Preeg, the film's animation supervisor. "We worked from day one."

The original movie resembled, well, what videogames looked like in 1982 -- pixellated, awkward and artificial. That wouldn't fly any more. Kosinski had a very clear idea how he wanted the movie to look and feel. He says that "like every sci-fi fan" he loved Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey. "Making it feel more photographic was important to me," he says. "Like we brought cameras into the world of Tron and shot this thing for real... There's very little magic in this film.

Everything you do has to have a physical feel to it. If you want to deliver a message to someone, you can't just beam it through your mind or send it through a signal. You have to get on your light cycle and meet another program. It's all analogue."

Kosinski brought in professionals from unlikely places. Friends from architecture school were assigned to create the infrastructure of Tron world. He hired Daniel Simon, a German "automotive futurist" who'd been integral in the relaunch of the Bugatti brand, to design the light-cycles. David Levy, who'd done much of the art design for the Assassin's Creed video game, became a "senior concept artist". Even Kosinski's production designer had never worked on a major film before. An extraordinary creative partnership resulted. "It all started to feel like it was coming from one hand," Kosinski says. "It was an interesting thing to see, 50 people operating like one big designer brain. I think that's where it has to be to make everything in the film feel like it interlocks." In other words, for the film to come together, the design team had actually to think like the Tron server.

The process went as follows: Kosinski's art department would produce concept sketches on paper. If he approved them, they would then go to "pre-viz" on the computer, which allowed him to block out shots and zoom around the world, looking at different angles, which was essential if the movie's complicated physical manoeuvres were going to work. "Everything was set up in a game-engine kind of way," Preeg says. "There's quite a bit of playing around with the physics of what a half-tonne motorbike without handlebars would look like driving around on a giant plane of glass."

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The graphics department then placed avatars of the characters into the scenes at a low polygon count, so Kosinski could pose them and move them around. This wouldn't have been possible after the scenes had been shot with real actors, because the fully rendered elements of the scenes would have crashed the computers. Instead, with low-res versions, it was possible to watch a rough cut before a scene had been shot or an actor had spoken a line.

Tron: Legacy's antagonist is a character named Clu, a program created by Kevin Flynn. But, like all programs in

Tron world, Clu bears the characteristics of his creator.

Although the world evolves, the programs don't age in the same way that humans do. So, although Kevin Flynn in the new movie is the grizzled Jeff Bridges as we know him now, Clu had to be early-80s Bridges. To pull this off, Kosinski approached Eric Barba, who won a special-effects Academy Award for Brad Pitt's age regression in

Kosinski and Barba met on a Nine Inch Nails video directed by David Fincher. "Joe is very knowledgeable, versatile and has a vision of what he wants," Barba says. "He knows the jargon. He speaks geek talk. You can't lie to him. He's one of us." Kosinski hired Barba as the film's visual-effects supervisor.

They discussed which Jeff Bridges they wanted Clu to resemble. "Even in our mind's eye," Barba says, "there were different interpretations." The Bridges from the original Tron movie didn't work, ironically enough, because he seemed too boyish and skinny. Kosinksi considered Bridges circa Starman (1984), but that version was too puffy. They finally decided on Bridges from Against All Odds, released the same year, but in which he played a leaner, chiselled former sports star. "I think it's the hardest thing you could do in visual effects -- create a digital human," Kosinski says. "And, even harder, a digital human who we know. It's not like we're creating someone new that no one can judge against. No one really knows what Brad Pitt's going to look like at 80, but we know what Jeff looked like at 35.

So the standard's even higher." When he was playing Clu, the venerable version of Bridges walked through the scene first to "get it where we wanted it to go", Kosinski says. A younger, more buff body double would be standing at the side, memorising Bridges's movements. Then they'd do the scene again with the double, his head encased in a "tracking cap" to record the minutiae of his head movements.

Meanwhile, Bridges stood at the side reading the lines, with multiple sensors attached to his face. Four tiny cameras captured his every facial tic, and those shots were then redirected to the computer, which created a young Bridges's head based on older Bridges's expressions. "If you had someone else drive the young head, it wouldn't feel like Jeff," Kosinski says. "It might look like him, but as soon as he started talking or moving or emoting, it wouldn't be him. The only way to have Jeff's personality come through would be for him to do the performance."

After that, using a wax mock-up of Bridges's head created by makeup-effects specialist Rick Baker's studio as a model, Kosinski's design team then started digitally chiselling Clu's head to make sure it looked like the real young Jeff Bridges in minute detail: one technician spent nine months working on the eyes. Adding to the complexity was the fact that Kosinski shot the entire movie in 3D. "It's ten times harder in 3D," Barba says. "You can't get away with anything.

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Vertebrae don't lie, scale doesn't lie. If it's half a pixel off, you'll notice it on a 50-foot screen." In the first

Tron, the circuit board costumes that the characters wore were Rotoscoped in later. For the sequel, the actors wore custom-built "glow suits" that emitted their own light and often provided the sole lighting in scenes. "If we hadn't used illuminated suits, it would have felt fake," Kosinski says. "Like in Star Wars when they draw their light sabers: the lightsaber doesn't light their face up, it's just there. With illuminated suits and illuminated discs, we avoided that."

That kind of perfectionism, Kosinski says, was the only way that the new Tron was going to work. "It's the new server concept. Years ago, there was a more rudimentary server. But it's been left alone, and now everything is more refined, more real. The simulation of the world is much more precise." This, he says, has an analogue in the real world. Technology has to imitate life. The more it advances, the more work you have to do.

That certainly seemed like the case on a Friday morning in September, barely three months before the Tron opening, as Kosinski, Barba, Preeg and dozens of effects artists furiously working on their laptops went over the visual "dailies" for the film, shot by shot, checking every frame for verisimilitude, with technicians from effects houses from Florida to Vancouver also conferenced into the conversation. Every time Kosinski gave his approval to a shot, a bell rang in the screening room and a light flashed, like an applause-o-meter at a talk show. The gathered gave a "whoo-hoo" that didn't seem too contrived. Finishing an effect for this movie was a hard-won collective victory. "The original Tron was finished in nine months,"

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Kosinski says. "This movie has taken more than twice as long. I don't know exactly what that means."